TOMS RIVER — Redemption’s a tricky thing in this age of YouTube and social media, where missteps go viral and judgment is both decisive and long-lasting. Altering one’s behavior isn’t easy, but changing others’ perceptions is even harder.

Mike Rice has no illusions about the path he must walk, the former Rutgers men’s basketball coach having emerged as the poster boy for abusive behavior and insensitivity, the images of his actions striking a visceral chord that transcended sports.

But the nationally televised prime-time mea culpas and controlled interviews — the staples of image rehabilitation these days — only go so far. At some point you have to re-enter the world you once knew and prove all the counseling and outreach to the groups you offended and long hours spent staring into the mirror have elicited change.

That process began for Rice on Monday morning in a banquet room at the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center, where a contrite, self-deprecating Rice made his first public appearance since being fired April 3, speaking to 250 high school basketball players and their coaches at the tip-off breakfast for the 30th WOBM Christmas Classic.

“I want to reach out. I want to give back,” Rice said following the event. “I am a different person now and I want to talk to people about learning from my mistakes and trying to improve yourself. This is a tremendous gathering of student-athletes and I thought it was a good way of doing that.’’

There’s still an 800-pound gorilla in any room Rice enters and probably will be for some time, the countless replays of him throwing basketballs at players’ heads and hurling homophobic slurs still fresh even eight months after disgruntled former staffer Eric Murdock went public with his collection of practice video clips.

But truly making things right starts with looking people in the eye and speaking from the heart, and that’s what Rice did Monday.

“As many of you know, I’ve had some free time over the last couple of months,” he quipped, “and I’ve picked up a new hobby: reading. I don’t know why some of you are laughing. I’m a deep, intellectual human being. Besides the self-help books that I gazed at, my new fascination, my new topic is what makes people elite?”

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Citing examples from Daniel Coyle’s book “The Talent Code,” which seeks to draw common threads about methods of coaching, training and motivation culled from hotbeds of talent in a variety of areas, both athletic and otherwise, Rice tried to use past and subsequent self-improvement to try to impact the future of the young athletes before him.

“The same common thread in every master coach is a laid back demeanor. I knew I had something going wrong,” he laughed.

This was no stand-up comedy routine, though.

Another concept Rice introduced was called “deep practice,” where you’re able to instantly learn from your mistakes.

“That’s hard for anyone to be honest with you,” Rice said.

“At Robert Morris, I averaged 26 wins a year … and people did tell me of my weaknesses and my mistakes. They did say sometimes, ‘Well coach, you sometimes use four-letter words in a disparaging way. Maybe you should work on that.’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ just like you yeah-yeah-yeah your coaches to death when he tells you you have to keep your head up when your dribbling, or your body language is bad.

“And some people would say, ‘Maybe you should control your intensity? Maybe you should tone it down a bit.’ Well again, I was so successful sometimes you don’t think it’s a weakness. Sometimes you don’t think it’s an issue. But all of the sudden those issues become problems if you don’t attack them.”

Central Regional High School boys basketball coach Steve Zengel traded elbows with Rice and his protégé, Robert Morris head coach Andy Toole, at Rebounds in Neptune back in the day, as well as crossing paths with Rice during Zengel’s stint as an assistant coach at Hampton University.

He was instrumental in drawing Rice out into a public setting, and hopes to have him speak to athletes at Central down the road.

“If we can learn from somebody else’s mistakes so we don’t have to make them, that’s the best thing that can happen,” Zengel said. “If my kids can learn what not to do. You use a slur, you kick them and abused them, hey, that’s the not the thing to do. He lost a $700,000 job from it, and maybe I could lose a college scholarship because I tweeted the wrong thing.”

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Rice recently retweeted something from Marquette coach Buzz Williams that said, “If you own up to your mistakes, they become part of your past. If you don’t, they become part of your future.”

In that respect, Rice has already done some heavy lifting. And as the crowd began to file out toward the rows of yellow school buses in the parking lot, Rice was only interested in looking forward.

“I’m just taking it day-to-day right now, not really sure what I’m going to do in the future,” said Rice, currently the Neptune-based Hoop Group’s chief operating officer of tournaments and camps. “It has been a pleasure to get back into teaching and coaching and helping kids reach their potential and goals. It’s been fun, but I’m not real sure what I’m going to be doing in the future.

“The coaches I’ve been talking to are supportive of the things that I’m doing to maybe learn from my mistakes. Supportive of what needs to change, and not just myself, but maybe the culture of coaching. But overall, the communication I receive from other coaches has been very supportive.”

Second chances have to be earned.

And that’s what Mike Rice — hat in hand — started trying to do Monday, beginning the process of rebuilding faith and trust within the very community he so publicly let down.